Elmwood - Brand the Boring

During the briefing, each of us was allocated a 'boring' job which we should try and brand in a way that made it stand out from the crowd. I was really happy with my selection - Energy Supply Company

Elmwood's advice for this was to think of a concept to run with and develop it quickly. The short time-frame of the brief in an already busy time-period also encouraged this way of working. Some initial words came to mind:

Power

Activity

Drive

Capacity

Function

Grid

Field

Charge

Current

Plug

I looked at some news articles and found that there is a large amount of dissatisfaction with energy supplies at the moment and there is definitely opportunity to differentiate from the crowd. Some quotes from the article say people "have a deep distrust of anything the energy companies say or do".

"customers are not convinced that the price increases they see are either fair or justified."

I came to the conclusion that a new energy supplier would need to present themselves as transparent and fair to a much larger extent than established players. With this in mind I thought of some initial taglines:

Power to the people

Putting you in charge

Bright Spark

I settled on the concept of a green energy supplier called Earth Wire.

Looking into the concept I found 3 main providers of sustainable energy plans:

1. Good Energy
Really simple, uncluttered website that has a friendly tone and reassures potential customers that the process of switching is safe and easy.

2. Ecotricity

Claims to be the UK's oldest green energy supplier. Quite consumer friendly in its appearance. All of its customers bill profit goes directly into investing into developing more sustainable sources. Still makes the process of switching to green energy seem daunting.

3. Green Energy

Does a really good job of educating the consumer, providing demonstrations of each of the different energy sources. Unfortunately it is a really forgettable brand and this does little to reassure the consumer of the quality of the service.

It became clear that while this service could not be provided as cheaply as traditional suppliers, there were plenty of ways to differentiate the two offerings and truly provide a better service to engaged consumers who are environmentally aware and want to know where their energy comes from, not just how much it will cost e.g:

I thought about what a truly responsible energy supplier would be able to provide for consumers and looked to the mobile phone market for an example. GiffGaff provide a fantastically different service to mainstream providers by letting consumers change their price plans each month instead of tying them to contracts that might not suit them further down the line. There are many complaints of consumers locked into unsuitable energy contracts and a solution like this has yet to emerge. 

Price plans (called goody bags)

I was keen on creating a clever logo concept for this brief and started looking at the negative space work of Noma Bar: 

Using the the idea of hidden imagery, I wanted to combine a house with a plug. When I digitised this, it occurred to me that the windows and door on a simplified house make the shape of a UK plug socket anyway. 

I wanted to really push the visuals aspect of using a plug socket so made a surround for the logo to represent the plug face and position the socket in the correct place on the left hand side. I also think this frames the two elements in a much more effective way and still keeps the subtlety of negative space. 

This is the logo I settled on to present at the crit on Tuesday.